Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,22
it in longer. I did, and this time something shifted. At precisely the same time the head rush hit, Derek slipped a cassette in his boombox.
“Black Dog.”
This was a moment. Maybe the moment. My head exploded. My mind blew up with the sound of the screaming guitar, the crazed vocal, the blasting beat. I was knocked on my ass. I hadn’t even heard of Led Zeppelin. I didn’t yet know the names Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. All I knew was that this music was electrifying every cell in my body. The mixture of marijuana and “Black Dog” sent me soaring. The sky opened up. The world got bigger and more beautiful. I was fucked up.
Shannon told me that I had to “maintain.” Maintain was the word. I had to maintain my high. Going back into school, I had to find a way to act cool. It wasn’t easy. When I tried to eat the leftover lamb sandwich Mom had made for me, I couldn’t chew or swallow. When I walked into history class, it was like someone had turned on a giant strobe light. Everything was moving in slow motion. My teacher Mr. Richards gave me a pass to go to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face, thinking that might bring me down. It didn’t. I looked at myself in the mirror. I asked myself, Will I ever come down from this? I made a funny face. I smiled. I laughed. Even though nothing funny had happened, I caught a case of the giggles. Then came the munchies. I could have eaten a mountain of pizzas. I went back to class, still high but able to hide it. On the first day of being stoned out of my mind, I learned to maintain, a skill that I would regularly employ for years to come.
On the same day and at the same time, I turned into both a pothead and a Zep head. Before the end of the week, I’d bought every single Led Zeppelin cassette. Marijuana and rock ’n’ roll became my steady diet.
Weirdly, Dad had prepared me for Zeppelin because of the Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsies record he’d bought back when we were still in New York. That caught my ear but didn’t set me on fire. Now with Zep ringing in my head, I heard their connection to Hendrix. Hendrix was the source. Turned out that Band of Gypsies, good as it was, was a live album and lacked the seismic impact of Hendrix’s studio recordings. I dug deep into Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland. Now I saw how Hendrix had opened the floodgates. He was the guitar god. Later, I learned that Jimi had been influenced by masters like Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Buddy Guy. As a kid, though, I heard him as the breakthrough genius. And it didn’t matter that he had been dead for eight years. He lived inside my head. His rock rearranged my brain. I couldn’t believe his intensity. Tonguing his Strat, smashing it against the sides of his giant Marshall amps, setting the thing on fire, distorting our national anthem in such a way that the song finally made sense.
Hendrix was rightfully the hero of every rock ’n’ roller. But I had other heroes who were not accepted by the surf-skate culture of Santa Monica. I loved KISS, but my friends said that they were for fags and that the band looked like they were wearing Halloween costumes. I didn’t give a fuck. As a matter of fact, on Halloween, I put on my mother’s leotard, black tights, platform boots, chains from a hardware store, and a full face of Gene Simmons’s demon makeup and proudly walked dead into the middle of the schoolyard. Everyone thought I was insane. I thought I was the Black Gene Simmons.
I loved how KISS turned comic book characters into rock stars. I loved their theatrics. Front man Paul Stanley’s androgynous allure, the way he belted out his bluesy riffs and pranced around the stage combining coquettishness with machismo. Ace Frehley’s screaming guitar solos with his customized Les Paul smoking from the pickups. Peter Criss, the cool Catman with the perfect backbeat and the levitating drum kit. Gene Simmons’s throbbing bass punctuated by his serpent-like tongue spewing blood!
I also loved the sophistication and slickness of Steely Dan. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were brilliant musicians and storytellers who created a blues-based jazz-rock genre